You do not need an agency to tell you whether your Google Ads budget is being wasted. You need one report, read properly, and about fifteen honest minutes.
Here is exactly what to pull, what you are looking for, and the specific pattern that tells you broad match is the actual problem rather than your offer or your landing page.
The One Report That Tells You the Truth
Pull the Search Terms Report, Not the Keywords Report
Your keywords report shows what you told Google Ads to target. Your Search Terms report shows what people actually typed before your ad appeared. These are frequently very different lists, and the gap between them is where wasted spend hides.
Pull it for at least the last 90 days. Sort by spend, descending. Read through the top of that list slowly.
What You Are Actually Looking For
Job seekers searching your service name alongside “jobs,” “careers,” or “salary.” People clearly researching how to do the thing themselves rather than hire someone. Queries containing a competitor’s name that somehow still matched one of your keywords. Anything with spend attached and zero conversions that has no plausible route to becoming a customer.
Every one of these was a genuine paid click. None of them were ever a realistic prospect.
Why This Happens: Broad Match Without a Negative List
The Mechanism
Broad match is designed to find related searches beyond your exact keyword, and it does this aggressively. Left alone, without a maintained negative keyword list working against it, it will happily spend your budget on searches only loosely related to what you actually offer.
This is not broad match malfunctioning. It is broad match doing exactly what it is built to do, in the absence of the guardrail that is supposed to accompany it.
A Red Flag Worth Checking Your Own Account Against
A commonly used benchmark treats more than 40 percent of spend on broad match combined with fewer than 200 negative keywords as a warning sign rather than a normal, healthy setup. It is a rule of thumb, not a hard law, but an account meeting both conditions at once is very likely carrying real, avoidable waste.
Check your own account against this before assuming your problem is the offer, the landing page, or the market.
Checking Your Negative Keywords Properly
Negatives Exist at Three Levels
Negative keywords can sit at the account level, the campaign level, and the ad group level, and a gap at any one of these levels lets irrelevant traffic through even if the other two look fine.
Check all three, not just whichever one you remember setting up originally.
Match Type Matters on Negatives Too
A phrase-match negative does not block every variant of a term you assumed it would cover. This is a common, quiet source of leakage: an owner adds one negative keyword, sees the exact phrase blocked, and assumes the problem is solved, while close variants continue to slip through.
A Working Rhythm, Not a One-Time Fix
A sustainable process runs on three intervals: a weekly Search Terms review, a monthly audit of shared negative lists, and a quarterly sweep across match types. An account that has gone six months or more without any of these three has almost certainly accumulated meaningful waste by the time anyone looks.
What to Actually Do With What You Find
Add the Obvious Ones First
Anything clearly irrelevant with spend and no conversions goes on the negative list immediately. This alone typically catches the most expensive, most obvious leaks in an account that has not been reviewed in a while.
Do Not Stop After the First Pass
The first review usually feels productive and complete. It rarely is. Genuine improvement comes from repeating this weekly, because new irrelevant queries surface continuously as your ads keep running and match types keep doing what they are built to do.
If the List Is Large, Prioritise by Spend
Where the search terms list is long, work down from the highest spend downward rather than trying to review everything in one sitting. The costliest waste is usually concentrated in a small number of terms near the top.
Two Things People Blame Instead, and Usually Should Not
“Our Offer Must Be Weak”
Low conversion rates get blamed on the offer or the pricing far more often than they should be. If a meaningful share of your clicks are coming from job seekers and DIY researchers who were never going to buy anything, no offer on earth converts that traffic. Fix the traffic quality question before concluding the offer itself is the problem.
“The Landing Page Must Be the Issue”
A landing page absolutely can lose conversions, and it is worth checking separately. But testing landing page changes against traffic that was never qualified in the first place wastes the test as much as it wastes the ad spend. Clean the traffic first, then judge the landing page on what remains.
Conversion Tracking Has to Exist First
None of this diagnostic works without conversion tracking actually installed and firing correctly. If you cannot see which searches led to an actual enquiry or sale, you cannot tell wasted spend from working spend, you can only guess. Checking that tracking is genuinely recording real conversions, not just page loads, is the step that has to happen before the Search Terms report becomes useful at all.
The Bottom Line
You do not need a scare statistic to know whether your budget is being wasted. You need the Search Terms report, sorted by spend, read honestly.
Check your broad match percentage against your negative keyword count. If you are over 40 percent broad match with under 200 negatives, that is your likely starting point. Build the weekly, monthly, quarterly rhythm rather than treating this as a one-time cleanup, because the leaks reopen the moment you stop checking.
If you would rather have someone audit this properly and set up the ongoing process rather than doing a single one-off cleanup, our Google Ads services in Dubai cover exactly this kind of account audit and setup.
WhatsApp Hameed for a quick question, or call +971 56 544 6241 for a free consultation. There is also a contact form if you would rather write it out.
The report already exists inside your account. Most of the waste is sitting in it, waiting to be read.
